Two Doors Down: Remembering Ray Manzarek Remembering Jim Morrison

Ray Manzarek, who died yesterday at the age of 74, had a voice as rich and stentorian as that of Jim Morrison, the front man of the band they founded in 1965, the Doors. But Manzarek put his voice to work as a raconteur rather than as a singer. In 2000, when V.F. was assembling its first music issue, I interviewed him for “Live at the Whisky,” my history of the Sunset Strip club the Whisky à Go Go, where the then unknown Doors scored the residency that secured them their fame—and infamy.

“Have you read the name of my book? What’s my book called?” Manzarek boomed at me when I arrived at his door in Beverly Hills, where he lived at the time. Fortunately, I had read his book, though so many Doors songs and albums have titles that lend themselves to memoir—“Riders on the Storm,” Strange Days, “Break on Through”—that I’d forgotten the title and hazarded a guess.

“Light My Fire?,” I said.

“Light My Fire! Very good! Come in!”

There was, it must be said, a kind of comic pomposity to Manzarek, a need to use words like “Dionysian” and to describe the Whisky’s young female talent booker’s crush on Morrison by saying, “She was smitten; the arrows of Eros went flying and struck her directly in the heart!”—an anecdote that the booker, Ronnie Haran Mellen, refuted as “bullshit”—but Manzarek was nonetheless an engaging host who didn’t tire of telling tales that he had to have already told a thousand times. His recounting of the Doors’ first performance of “The End” in its full, Oedipal freak-out version—a performance that so outraged the Whisky’s middle-aged proprietors that the band was thereafter banned from the club—is a central set piece of my article. I won’t give it away here.

I must admit that I am not much of a Doors fan, but both Manzarek and John Densmore, the band’s drummer and an excellent raconteur in his own right, were uncommonly eloquent guides to L.A.’s fertile pop and rock scenes of the 60s. So many of the figures I interviewed for that story have since passed away—Elmer Valentine, the Whisky’s founder; Arthur Lee of Love; John Phillips of the Mamas and the Papas; the producer Terry Melcher, who was also Doris Day’s son; and now Manzarek—that I realize how lucky I am to have been in the right place at the right time, getting these guys’ bonkers, barely-believable-but-nonetheless-true stories on the record while they were still around.